AP apologizes for firing journalist over WWII scoop

In World War II's final moments in Europe, Associated Press correspondent Edward Kennedy gave his news agency perhaps the biggest scoop in its history. He reported, a full day ahead of the competition, that the Germans had surrendered unconditionally at a former schoolhouse in Reims, France.

For this, he was publicly rebuked by the AP, and then quietly fired.

The problem: Kennedy had defied military censors to get the story out. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President Harry S. Truman had agreed to suppress news of the capitulation for a day, in order to allow Russian dictator Josef Stalin to stage a second surrender ceremony in Berlin. Kennedy was also accused of breaking a pledge that he and 16 other journalists had made to keep the surrender a secret for a time, as a condition of being allowed to witness it firsthand.

Sixty-seven years later, the AP's top executive is apologizing for the way the company treated Kennedy.

"It was a terrible day for the AP. It was handled in the worst possible way," said president and CEO Tom Curley.

Kennedy, he said, "did everything just right." Curley rejected the notion that the AP had a duty to obey the order to hold the story once it was clear the embargo was for political reasons, rather than to protect the troops.

"Once the war is over, you can't hold back information like that. The world needed to know," he said in an interview.

Curley, who is retiring this year, has also co-written an introduction to Kennedy's newly published memoir, "Ed Kennedy's War: V-E Day, Censorship & The Associated Press."

Kennedy, who died in a traffic accident in 1963, had long sought such public vindication from his old employer. His daughter, Julia Kennedy Cochran, of Bend, Ore., said she was "overjoyed" by the apology.

"I think it would have meant a lot to him," she said.

The German surrender happened at 2:41 a.m. French time on May 7, 1945.

Kennedy was one of 17 reporters taken to witness the ceremony. He and the others were hastily assembled by military commanders, then pledged to secrecy by a U.S. general while the group flew over France. As a condition of being allowed to see the surrender in person, the correspondents were barred from reporting what they had witnessed until authorized by Allied headquarters.

Initially, the journalists were told the news would be held up for only a few hours. But after the surrender was complete, the embargo was extended for 36 hours -- until 3 p.m. the following day.

Nevertheless, Kennedy initially stayed quiet. Then, at 2:03 p.m., the surrender was announced by German officials via a radio broadcast from Flensburg, a city already in Allied hands. That meant, Kennedy knew, that the transmission had been authorized by the same military censors gagging the press.

Furious, Kennedy went to see the chief American censor and told him there was no way he could continue to hold the story. The military had broken its side of the pact by allowing the Germans to announce the surrender.

After being fired by the AP, Kennedy took a job as managing editor of the Santa Barbara News-Press in California, and later became publisher of the Monterey Peninsula Herald.